Adobe expands Photoshop and Lightroom offer

When Adobe announced a version of Creative Cloud for photographers in September, there was a catch -- you had to already own Photoshop CS3 or later to qualify for the special pricing.

Now Adobe is lifting that requirement for a limited time. Through December 2, 2013, the $9.99 (£8.78/€12,29) per month subscription is available to everyone. The offer applies to the first twelve months' subscription, after which it will rise to the normal price of $19.99/month.

Wow. It looks like either customers have taken them to task and they're desperate, or it's long term planning to hook even more subscriptions before significantly raising the prices. I suspect the latter.

If you look at it another way, you can probably say their servers now may be even safer than ever since Adobe certainly doesn't want this to happen again. It would be smart of them to beef up their security infrastructure after an incident like this.

Sometimes it takes an attack like this to discover any vulnerabilities or holes in security to address them and make your data center even more secure.

VirtualMirage....happen again? The hackers took my login and credit card info. I am not a Cloud subscriber. It should have NEVER happened. Did you read how easy it was for the hackers to get into the lazy Adobe network? You go ahead and trust them. I and many others are done with them.

not really desperate. but i think they were testing the waters, i mean cloud, for scalability and issues before opening up to the general public.While 4.99 will pretty much bring in the upgraders, 9.99 is pretty good for anyone starting with photoshop & lightroom. its wait and watch now - if they introduce 7.99 for CS 7 with splendid features & lightroom, i may jump in. 100/yr may not be bad.

If Adobe was savvy enough to test the waters they wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. It just turned out that people weren't willing to pay more. Not to mention the fairness issue, with some people eligible and others, not.

ijak-with all due respect, and I am no particular Adobe guy, not a stockholder, not employed by them, but unless you do something really crazy, your work will not be "lost" if you "miss a payment". I am not sure what your workflow is, but saving your work as a TIFF or other common formats will allow you to open and access your work in any number of other programs-Corel, etc.

That said, however, the question is what will the price be next year-and as another poster alluded to, it is not unlike a cable company.

I think some people want their layers maintained because once they are gone a lot of hard work goes right in the garbage can should they choose to go back and make changes. Adobe is good at creating a system of self- reinforcing supply and demand. For example, Acrobat is free to anyone to use it (Yay!) but if you want to create PDF documents you're going to pay out the nose (sad face). Oh, it's all perfectly legit and I don't begrudge them their money, but when a company radically changes how it charges for things it feels like they are no longer trustworthy.

The question people should be asking is: "What does the price increase to after Dec 2, 2013". Adobe is starting to remind me of my cable company. They are always offering a a very compelling deal if I will switch vendors but I can never get them to tell me what the price will go up to after that first year is up.

If the cloud service is blocked because of your geographical location you can bypass the restriction by subscribing to a personal VPN service. Witopia.net has VPN servers in many countries; you can select a server location via a drop-down menu that is in a country that isn't blocked.

The monthly cost is between $5-$7 depending on the plan and there is a 30-day refund period. https://www.witopia.net

Nope. Adobe figures now that they got most of people who were going to sign up at $19.99 and 49.99 a month subscribed they might as well get a bunch more people paying them 9.99 a month as well as it just means even more money for them. They are trying to get the fence sitters to commit. That is why it is a limited time only.

What happens if you don't have internet service for any number of reasons and Adobe can't go online to see if your copy is legit. It shuts down and you can't use the program. This can happen right when you need it to meet a deadline.It's happened to me.If I treated my customers like Adobe has treated me I would be out of business. Looking for alternatives.

Ahhh, do you smell that? It is the whiff of desperation on behalf of Adobe. People are literally not buying into the Cloud - Adobe has bet the farm on it and now the repo men are on the horizon. If I had Adobe shares I would be selling them fast.

Adobe needs steady income and in terms of features, there really isn't anything wrong with the current software. So it's simple. To survive, they need to get people to pay even if there is nothing new and substantial to pay for. That's where the subscription comes from. The cloud is just a solution looking for a problem.

The software will work offline just fine. It only has to check in every 30 days. The chances someone's internet will bed down for that long is very low baring some kind of natural disaster and then you have more important things to worry about anyway.

Google has them loosing sleep with their free online editing. Adobe has been screwing us all for years now their coming back for more. In 12 months the price will be $30 and up up and away from there. No thanks!

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